Dr. Beverly Rodriguez

I am completing post-residency fellowship training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Stanford and am relishing the opportunity to do a rotation here at BACA. I am originally from Southern California, grew up in Los Angeles, and moved for most of my childhood to Orange County (before it became infamously and erroneously known as the O.C.). My parents are from the Philippines and raised a very tight knit family, so it was difficult to leave home for college. I made it as far as the Bay Area, attending Stanford University for my undergraduate degree in Human Biology. This was a major that encouraged independent, creative thinking, but with a multidisciplinary approach, a paradigm that has shaped my style of learning since.

Following college, I completed a Ph.D. program in Behavioral Psychology at UCLA. My research focused on the treatment of anxiety disorders in adults. While there, I decided to complete premedical courses in chemistry and physics, classes I had not taken during college, and became more and more interested in a career in medicine. I was most interested in understanding the factors that determined our behaviors, and the interaction of our biology and our environment in influencing how we behaved. I returned to Stanford to do my medical school training and found myself interested in more specialties than I had anticipated, including pediatric hematology-oncology, obstetrics, internal medicine, and general surgery! I ultimately envisioned myself becoming a family doctor and did a year-long rotation at Stanford’s Family Medicine Clinic. But I found that I most enjoyed my work with patients and families after we had attended to the initial problems that brought them to the doctor’s office (e.g., colds, back pain, etc.). It was at the tail-end of the 15 minute appointment that we would begin conversations about the deeper issues affecting patients’ lives, like family relationships in conflict, or problems at work or school. My enjoyment of that quality and depth of connection with patients is what led me to psychiatry.

I decided to leave Stanford (my home of sorts) to do my training in General Psychiatry with San Mateo County’s Residency Training Program, a wonderful county program. There, I worked with patients who struggled with mental health issues but also life circumstances, including homelessness, financial instability, joblessness, and addiction, among others. It was an incredibly rich learning experience. During this time, I rounded out my therapy training, which had been focused previously on cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety, and developed a new interest in family therapy. I am now completing a 2-year fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, back at Stanford. I am board-certified in General Adult Psychiatry.

In my free time, I love eating good food, watching good movies, and taking walks with my family and two little pugs.